SOURCE: Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “‘We Live in an Age of Lawlessness’: The Response to Lynching in Virginia.” In Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, pp. 161-90. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Brundage details responses to lynching by politicans and the press in Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Opposition to lynching in Virginia mounted slowly. Even at its strongest, it faced daunting obstacles. Opposition to mob violence was controversial everywhere in the South because virtually any discussion of the legitimacy of lynching touched upon white attitudes about race, crime, sexuality, and the very foundations of ordered society. Southern critics of lynching were always vulnerable to the charge that they were guilty of sectional treason, of pandering to the North, and of advocating “negrophilism.” Meanwhile, the crippling dogma of white supremacy, the autonomy of county governments, and...